Search Error: Authentication failed because the remote party has closed the transport stream

A few days ago the following errors startud to show up in one off the WFE servers from a SharePoint farm:

Failed to obtain crawl status. —> System.Net.WebException: The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send. —> System.IO.IOException: Authentication failed because the remote party has closed the transport stream.

Job ‘Distribution List Import Job’ failed. It will be re-tried again in 120 second(s).

Reason: Failed to obtain crawl status.

Techinal Details:

Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileException: Failed to obtain crawl status. —> System.Net.WebException: The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send. —> System.IO.IOException: Authentication failed because the remote party has closed the transport stream.